The maturation of Capitalism: Wage-labor vs. Slavery

“I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait- perhaps a national weakness. It is in fact, that whatever makes for wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap! Fredrick Douglas, 1852.

If disestablishment is the separation of church and state, then is there a word for the separation of state from church? During class discussion, one opinion of disestablishment in the current workaday world of American politics, was of a relationship of give and take, with a distinction between the worlds of religious and political ambition being established, and this distinction allowing for the activation of a default setting. That being said, if we are able to recognize, if only out of habit and practice, when religion is taking point on an issue of policy, are we also equipped to detect when the state employs religion, for issues involving business and economy?

In the Charles Elliot essay (#57), “Slavery and Methodist Schism,” there exists a type of religiosity, that in its strength of opinion and scope of reach, illuminates the possible duality of such motivations. Charles Elliot contends that, “slavery” is “a flagrant violation of the law of God,” and that “people of God cannot exist so long as slavery continues.” He elucidates eighteen points to complete his argument, none of which address the potential economic or social complications of actualizing such opinion in the world of 1850. And as far as questions concerning faith, one wonders about the timely ambition and activating strength of “God’s laws,” if slavery existed and flourished for so long, seemingly unimpeded, in a society where individuals lived in abeyance to those laws.

Is it possible to know if Elliot has any political motivation, particularly if they are not explicited stated? A good place to start, in attempting to understand possible political motive behind the antislavery movement during the eighteen-hundreds, is in understanding some of the socioeconomic changes that were taking place in the North during this time and how these changes were leading the North into conflict with the Southern, slave-based economy. According to John Ashworth, “The civil war is best understood as the clash of two antagonistic ideologies, proslavery and antislavery, that had been generated by the opposed labor systems that developed South and North of the Mason and Dixon’s line, namely slavery and wage-labor” (Rugemer, 2009). In other words, the North was industrializing and attempting to “mature the experiment of capitalism.” One vital element to the success of this experiment was believed to be the use of “wage-labor (people to make and buy things).” Slave-labor being unfairly competitive with the Capitalist model.

Would the North have rallied around a cause as untried, inhuman and class motivated as “the maturation of capitalism,” in a war of wage-labor vs. slavery, or was it necessary to equate and confuse issues of capital, with personal faith and the laws of God?

References:

Rugemer, E. (2009, March). Explaining the Causes of the American Civil War, 1787-1861. Reviews in American History, 37 (1), 56-68. Retrieved September 22, 2009, from Academic search Premier database.

Douglass, Frederick. What to the slave is the Fourth of July? (1852). Critical Issues in American Religious History. Baylor University Press, Waco, 2006. 285-288.

Elliot, Charles. Slavery and the Methodist Schism (1843). Critical Issues in American Religious History. Baylor University Press, Waco, 2006. 279-281.